In answers and comments to Select points within a polygon and update attributes I think it is being suggested that Spatial Join (Analysis) and/or Near (Analysis) may be faster than Intersect (Analysis) for performing a point in polygon overlay to transfer polygon attributes onto the points that intersect them.
This surprised me because I have always expected that Intersect might be a bit quicker than Spatial Join, and I think it would be quite a lot quicker than Near. Unfortunately, I do not have an Advanced level license of ArcGIS for Desktop so I cannot performance test Near.
Does anyone have a reproducible test that indicates Near and/or Spatial Join being faster than Intersect?
I am going to provide as an answer my test on Intersect vs Spatial Join where I create a 10×10 fishnet of polygons and a 100×100 fishnet of points covering the same extent (0,0,10,10) and then perform a vanilla Intersect and a vanilla Spatial Join (INTERSECT) of the two.
Best Answer
My quick testing, using ArcGIS 10.2.2 for Desktop on Windows 7 SP1, indicates that Intersect is faster than Spatial Join.
This test, run from IDLE:
yielded these results:
I ran my test with the Intersect first a few times, and then the Spatial Join first a few times, and Intersect was always the winner on this data.